• Facebook Apps On Any Website: Clever Move
  Fantastically interesting way to use FB data offsite.
  (tags: api facebook widgets socialnetworks mashup technology)
• .htaccess tricks and tips.. part two: url rewriting with mod rewrite.
  (tags: htaccess apache mod_rewrite web tutorial)

• Download Flickr Pics
  Windows only
  (tags: flickr)
• Introducing Prologue « WordPress.com
  A twitter like theme for wordpress - now if someone could pull together a Tumblr style bookmarklet posting system, we’d be away…
  (tags: blogging blogs interesting wordpress twitter microblogging)
• GreenPrint World Edition
  “GreenPrint World Edition identifies and removes unnecessary pages or space—like images you don’t need to waste ink on or pages with lone URLs—from your print jobs. GreenPrint also keeps track of just how much money, paper, and greenhouse gases you’re
  (tags: environment)

Since leaving the BBC at the start of the month I’ve been working on an incredibly interesting project that is trying to build a huge photo album of the West Midlands* in 2008 - The Big Picture.

The Big Picture is a project for Arts Council West Midlands, being run by Audiences Central (who have employed me), and is in a very modern way based heavily on Flickr to hold and organise all the photos we’re gathering. The site - inthebigpicture.co.uk - has been put together by 3Form, and is doing a lot of clever stuff with the API, it can be used completely as a front end for Flickr and includes some smashing geotagging features.

It launches today, so go and have a look for yourself.

I’m working as Online Editor, which so far has included a lot of copywriting and decisions about how people might use the site, but I’m hoping to be able to work more off-site after launch as we’ve got some fun stuff planned for Facebook and other social media sites - and also in the real world too.

For launch week we’re out and about across the region - Wolverhampton today, ending in Brum on Friday afternoon, full details on the site - do drop by and say hello if you’re around.

*The West Midlands in this case includes Stoke, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Hereford and Worcester, Coventry and Warwickshire as well as the more traditional Birmingham and The Black Country.

• MonitorThis
  Create OPML file across 22 search engines for a search term
  (tags: rss search opml tools feeds monitor)

• Flickr: The Commons
  Huge US Library of Congress flickr account - hoping users will tag to flesh out metadata
  (tags: flickre metadatam tags crowdsourcing copyright community history photography)

• Archant’s Web Editor on geotagging
  “Could 2008 be the year geotagging breaks through?” It should.
  (tags: geotagging news)

• Athens Olympics Sites - domains lapsed
  Organisers aren’t the only ones to blame, old World Cup sites are lost too.
  (tags: domain event)

I spend a very interesting and informative night at the first Birmingham Bloggers meet-up. It was interesting as the people who turned up were connected only in that they wrote (or really liked) blogs and they lived near enough to Birmingham.

So blogs and Birmingham was the main conversation that seemed to emerge. Which kind of alienates those that blog, but not about Brum - of course not all bloggers blog directly about their lives or the place that they live, most have an angle or a subject.

Everyone seemed interested in somehow improving the visibility of Brum blogging tho - to wit Dave decided to build Brum Search (based on Google), and over at nunovo there’s much talk of Rivers of Brum. There was also much general consensus over the use of “birminghamUK” as a more general tag - so I’ve expanded the scope of upyerbrum to bring through anything tagged that onto its front page (although only items tagged “upyerbrum” get automatically added to the digg-style voting pages).

• Friends Reunited to drop sbscription model?
  ITV is planning to ditch Friends Reunited’s subscription model and associations with ITV (wise move) and make it advertiser-funded. According to Hitwise Friends Reunited was the 14th-most-visited social networking site with a 0.53% share of UK visits la
  (tags: socialnetwork freindsreunited advertising)

• Prediction Markets as strategy
  (tags: Geekery, socialmedia)